Baudelaire, Vischer, and self-transforming empathy
Scott, M
Date: 14 October 2021
Journal
Nineteenth-Century French Studies
Publisher
University of Nebraska Press
Publisher DOI
Abstract
This article proposes to situate what it will show to be Charles Baudelaire’s bi-directional
empathy with objects in relation to his departure from Romanticism and move towards
Modernism. It will show that transformative receptiveness to the outside world is at least as
central to his aesthetic as any self-projecting transformation ...
This article proposes to situate what it will show to be Charles Baudelaire’s bi-directional
empathy with objects in relation to his departure from Romanticism and move towards
Modernism. It will show that transformative receptiveness to the outside world is at least as
central to his aesthetic as any self-projecting transformation of that world. The article will
consider the poet’s presentation of identification with objects, in the poems “La Cloche fêlée,”
“La Musique,” and “Le Flacon,” in the light of early thinking about empathy by Robert Vischer
and others, and then briefly in the light of more recent work on the theme. It will argue that his
inscriptions of the confrontation between self and non-self reveal him to be an early thinker of
a self-transforming kind of empathy, which is central both to his Modernism and to the thinking
of the early empathy theorists whose work was so influential for Modernism.
French
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